70-Year-Old Prank Revealed

Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle a story about a prank that the Clampers (E Clampus Vitus, man!) pulled on UC Berkeley was featured. In short the Clampers faked a brass plaque that intimated that Sir Francis Drake landed in Marin 462 years ago. The Clampers are an organization known for, well, drinking and horsing around, but this kind of prank, one that spans 70 years (or more than 400, depending on your point of view) is epic and inspiring.

Comments

67 more years....

[larry bagina]

and 3dRealms will announce that Duke Nukem was also a hoax.

Re:67 more years....

[Reality Master 101]

This post implies that it's only been three years. Just for the record, the earliest Usenet Post referencing Duke Nukem Forever was June 7, *1996*. Yes, coming up on SEVEN YEARS. Heh.

Re:67 more years....

[netsharc]

Interestingly, in some racing games they sometimes use "DNF" when a racer "Did Not Finish". :)

Old-timey Fun

[molrak]

So that's what people did before they had television and the internet to occupy themselves with!

Stick to the basics

[one9nine]

Wouldn't it have been a lot cheaper and easier just to leave a bag of flaming dog poo on the professor's front step? Or make a phony phone call a la Homer style

Homer: "Hello Dean, you're a stupid head."

Dean: "Homer, is that you?" (Looks out the window and sees him a the pay phone right outside the office.)

Homer: "Aaaaah!" (Runs away)

Where he was promptly met by. . .

[kfg]

a real estate agent who tried to sell him a 200 square foot condo for $750,000.

Ah, those were the days, back when Bay Area real estate was still cheap.

KFG

intimated, ay?

[unformed]

I didn't know Sir Francis Drake was intimate with brass plaques.

Smog control

[elflet]

Next we'll learn that smog controls were a historical prank perpetrated by E Clampus Vitus chapter 33MPG... We'll call the main part the 'ECV valve', that should clue them in. And if not, just think of all the beer they'll pay for..."

Is it all a hoax?

[Black Copter Control]

Did anybody bother to consider that the story about the hoax (and even the reference to the possibility of the hoax being a hoax) is, itself, a hoax?

Is there any limit to the recursion on this?

Re:Is it all a hoax?

[pete-classic]

Is there any limit to the recursion on this?

Yes. My attention span.

And . . . we just exceeded it.

-Peter

PS: Did anyone else take the "riddle inside an enigma" or whatever to be an allusion to the film "JFK"?

-P

Re:Is it all a hoax?

[Anonymous Coward]

PS: Did anyone else take the "riddle inside an enigma" or whatever to be an allusion to the film "JFK"?

Sigh.

Emperor Norton Connection

[dwdyer]

These people also picked up Emperor Norton as an icon, as did the Discordians.

See here (info on Norton) and here (more Clamper info in the second article as well).

-W-

News to me...

[Mulletproof]

"The Clampers are an organization known for, well, drinking and horsing around..."

And what fraternitiy worth their salt isn't???

Re:News to me...

[MrResistor]

The Clampers aren't a fraternity, they're a club, sort of like the Elks or the Order of the Moose.

Drinking and horsing around are what they're best known for, and what they do most often, but another thing that they do and are known for is restoring historical sites, like buildings in abandoned Gold Rush towns and such.

Another retro review

[Animats]

This book came out in 1996. Hello?

Speaking of Hoaxes

[Henry V .009]

This fellow has decided to take Holocaust Revisionism to its logical conclusion. A lot of info on some of the great historical hoaxes.

Wow.

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

I believe that this is the oldest confirmed story Slashdot has linked to. They knew that it was hoax in 1936...

Just like Nessie

[blamanj]

Reminiscent of the 1934 Nessie photograph. Even though it's been documented as a hoax, the true believers live on.

And of course, crop circles are practically a religion to some.

Well, the prank was on them.

[Bruce Perens]

The E Clampus Vitus members who perpetrated the prank were themselves history professors at Berkeley as well. They had to be history professors because they used correctly archaic writing and language. But the joke was entirely on them. First, someone moved their plaque from Pt. Reyes to Remillard Point by Larkspur Landing, a drive across all of Marin and certainly deliberate IMO - it was placed in another likely place for the ship to land, but where the perpetrators couldn't find it. Then it was found three years later and conveyed to the professor, who believed its veracity. And then the perpetrators couldn't confess to their own fraud. It didn't happen under their control and they (and their victim) would have been disgraced because of all of the news that had gone on about it.

Bruce

Reminds me of another prank...

[10Ghz]

In 1628, the flagship of the Swedish navy, Wasa, sank within minutes of starting her maiden-voyage (the ship was top heavy due to extra gun-deck they added in the middle of the construction).

The ship was resurfaced in 1961 (it was discovered in 1956) . It took several days to accomplish. As it happens, there were some finnish techics-students (teekkarit) visiting Stockholm then. Teekkarit are famous for pulling pranks, and they though that this would be the perfect possibility for the ultimate prank. They went and bought a miniature copy of a statue of Paavo Nurmi (a famous finnish runner), sneaked past the guards, went in to the ship (that was still in the bottom of the sea) and placed the statue in the captains quarters. I bet the people who studied the sip after it was resurfaced were quite puzzled when they found that statue ;). The guys who pulled that off never revealed how they did it.

I don't believe it!

[Abductor]

That plaque has been there for ages, I just took it as fact. It's prominetly displayed on one of the busiest little thruways in Northern California-- "Sir Francis Drake Blvd". Wild!